Hecky

I thought Hecky had no input in who he signed? Or was it that he had too much work because he had to do 237 jobs at once?

 

I think as well people need to take what managers say with a punch of salt. I’ve read comments about what he’s said about Jackson for example & what do you expect him to say? Whether he’s personally scouted the player or not he’s going to tell him he watched him. He’s got to in order to try & get him to sign for him.

It was the same with Mallan at Barnsley. He’d said the week before that the squad was unbalanced & he’d got too many attacking midfielders & then Stevie Mallan signs. What does he do? He does what any manager with a brain cell does & tells him & the media he really rates him, he’s a player we’ve wanted for ages etc because it’s his job to motivate his players. What’s the alternative? ‘Stevie I’ve never watched you but the scouts say you’re good, you’re a bit surplus to requirements at the minute but you might get a chance if we get a few injuries’. Of course not, if you do that then you’ve got a handful of George Moncur’s kicking off & wanting a loan move away by the end of August.

Now I’m not saying he didn’t watch Jackson he may well have but you’ve got to look at it realistically. He didn’t get the job while February, we were playing twice a week regularly, our season went on an extra 3 weeks due to the play offs, exactly how much scouting did he really have the time to do?

It’s like the following summer, there were 16 new signings if I remember right. So in the season before you have to bear in mind we’d got no chief exec, Patrick Cryne’s sadly dying of cancer, we’d allegedly got anywhere between 5 & 8 players demanding transfers away & we needed loanees to replace them in January & on top of that we were short staffed for a while due to Tommy Wright & the bung issue. How much time has Heckingbottom really got to scout players for the following summer?

Is he really dedicating time & effort to scout all of Thiam, Cavare, Gardner, Williams x 2, Pinnock, Lindsay, McCarthy, Pearson, Fryers, Barnes, Mallan, Ugbo & whoever else we signed? Of course he isn’t it’s impossible. Did he tell all of them he’d watched them loads & really rated them? Of course he did, he’d be a fool not to.

It’s like Redknapp at Birmingham. He signed about 15 players that summer. Does anyone honestly think he’d been watching Marc Roberts & co beforehand? Of course he hadn’t. I’d bet any money he told Roberts how great he was & told him how good in the air he was & how quick he was as he’d been briefed by his scouts.

 

My thoughts as well.